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| Module 12 | | Interpreting Characters’ Actions,
Beliefs, Agendas, Goals |
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Another important strategy is students’ ability to interpret characters’ beliefs, agendas, and goals from their actions. Their ability to understand characters depends on their ability to go beyond the actions or dialogue in a story to infer what characters believe about each other, their agendas or plans, and the goals they are trying to achieve. Part of this involves the ability to infer actions as social practices represented by the characters’ actions, practices such as the following:
| Establishing one’s position of authority or status. Characters are continually negotiating their position of authority or status related to their rights to do certain things. Students could infer practices having to do with asserting or establishing their status or power as dominant or subordinate), independent or dependent), or intimate/loving or distant/hating).
Including or excluding others according to a social hierarchy. As part of establishing their authority or status, characters include or exclude others according to a perceived social hierarchy. They often use language to label characters as the “other” or “different” — as being outside of one’s valued inner circle.
Maintaining and terminating relationships. Characters are continually attempting to maintain their relationships through avoiding or mitigating conflicts that may undermine that relationship, for example, using face-saving strategies to avoid embarrassing others.
Detecting signs of honesty and deception in a situation. Characters are continually sizing up characters’ actions to discern signs of honesty, sincerity, or deception.
In studying film adaptations, students could examine the extent to which the film portrays their conception of a character by the choice of a certain actor or actress, as well as the type of acting performance and methods used to portray that character. For example, Bridget Pool describes the adaptation of the characters from Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In dropping the use of Chief Bromden’s first-person narrative perspective of the novel, to employ more of an objective perspective. The film also focuses on developing audience identification with the main character, McMurphy.
| Another important aspect of characterization in film is the way in which the camera work and music serves to portray certain character traits. In his book, Teaching in the Dark, which describes methods of integrating film into the literature classroom, John Golden (2001) describes the portrayal of Henry V in the film adaptation of the Shakespeare play in which Henry delivers the “Crispin Day Speech” to rally his troops to defeat the French:
| As he begins, he is in the center, on the men’s level, but as he continues he moves to a
make-shift platform above the gathered crowd. The nonidegetic music changes radically to a very light, then swelling and rousing, melody . . . . Throughout his speech , we cut from medium shots of Henry back to shots of the soldiers who are clearly being deeply affected by his words. When Henry says that “We few, we happy few” are the only ones to share in this glorious victory, we the audience see the only close-up in the scene. The music reaches its crescendo just as Henry shouts “upon St. Crispin’s day“ and we see long shots of the men shouting and pumping their fists in the air. (pp. 65–66)
Curiouser and Curiouser! [ Analyzing Fictional Characters in the Language Arts Classroom / New York Times Lesson Plan ]
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